Let’s say you are in an emergency room and you have a patient being wheeled in from the ambulance who is bloody and critically injured.
The man is in his middle age, he is overweight and has high blood pressure and cholesterol and has diabetes. He’s been in a bad traffic accident and has lost a lot of blood. He’s going into shock.
In the emergency room are too old pros, Drs. Bacon and Groveton. They are knowledgeable about trauma, but they have attended a lot of continuing education seminars about the problems of patients as they age and what do do about it over the long term.
What the man needs now is blood, but instead, Drs. Bacon and Groveton immediately lecture him about his sins. Dr. Bacon tells the man: “You are a Boomer and look at you. Fat. Stupid. Lazy. Helpless. You need to go on a strict diet and stop spending so much on Pabst and pork rinds and Kentucky Fried Chicken. Get some exercise, too, and try to get a disciplined outlook on life.”
The patient, however, continues to bleed. Will he die?
That’s the nut of the matter now that America’s feeble economic recovery is staggering and may fall backwards. You have Dr. Groveton quoting, of all people, Paul Krugman. And you have Dr. Bacon about to unleash his treatise on the dark futures we spoiled Boomers face. The bug-a-boo is government spending, deficits and debt — the usual conservative litany. And while we’re add, throw in a tax cut. Just in time for house races this fall and General Assembly election sin 2011.
But consider this passage from today Journal. According to the WSJ column by Thomas Frank:
“Solve the recession and we’ll eventually bring the deficit back down, too. The real danger is that instead we will decide to regard the deficit as a problem entirely unto itself — a quasi-moral issue that needs to be addressed independently of the larger economy — and that we will proceed to budget-balance ourselves right back into the economic ditch. For a glimpse of how this works, take a look at once-boom Ireland, where a starvation diet designed to control the deficit has made the recession more or less permanent.”
It is important to remember that, like the pudgy man injured in the traffic wreck, treatment has to be continuous. It just doesn’t stop at one stimulus program after the big drop in GDP. It has to be ongoing. The recovery from the Great Depression staggered and then fell backwards by a host of issues, the lack of proper government stimulus and harsh tariff laws that froze global trading (for quasi-moral and stupid reasons). IN fact, what finally put the spike in thedepression once and for all was the massive government spending for World Warr II (not that we want that again).
Therein lies the rub. The solution’s name is Keynes. It is time for Drs. Bacon and Groveton to stop lecturing and telephone the blood bank.
Peter Galuszka